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Comment by causalscience | Hacker News Reader

The fact that you leave unsaved work overnight is the actual crazy part.

Why though? On Mac, I have tons of unsaved work: many TextEdit windows which keep their state for many months, even through reboots. And it has been working like for at least 10 years. It's such a simple, little quality-of-life thing. And Microsoft just doesn't care.

This is what a computer should be doing: helping the user to get their work done, without the user having to worry about insignificant details about saving files. E.g. does Google Docs ever ask where to save a file before closing the browser or shutting down the computer? No you just get an untitled document that is automatically saved. If I want to rename it or save it in a different location, I am free to do so. But as long as I don't, it doesn't get in the way and just persists stuff automatically.

I don't disagree, but you have to know which applications reliably keep their state across restarts. You can't blindly rely on it on any desktop system. The Microsoft Office applications actually do auto-save documents since a couple of years ago, even though the recovery UX can be a bit awkward.

What Microsoft doesn't care about is that you may have applications running that don't do that, when Windows reboots for updates.

On macOS the feature is baked into the OS's APIs, the app developer just opts into using them. If they don't, quitting with unsaved work will prompt the user modally, and block the restart to the point where the OS will timeout the reboot process and give up. The only way to purposefully lose unsaved work in almsot every app I've ever used on macOS is to yank the power cable or hold the power button down.

Window locations and app state are written to plist files, again, using OS libraries and APIs for app resume. I can reboot my Mac and not even realize it happened sometimes it all comes back the way it was.

The blocking happens on Windows as well, except that the timeout logic is the reverse: it force-quits the applications then, because presumably the potential security update is more important.

Yep. On Mac (and Linux, actually) I know of some applications that do that. I also know that on Windows most applications don't do that. I would also never leave un-saved work open on Windows.

I was replying to: "The fact that you leave unsaved work overnight is the actual crazy part". As long as you know which apps auto-save and know you can somewhat rely on them, it's not so crazy.

> Why though?

> Microsoft just doesn't care.

So you know why. Also, Macs have other apps besides textedit, do all of them preserve unsaved docs across restarts?

> what a computer should be doing

Ok, but the discussion is about reality

Most stuff on my mac seems ok. The clunkiest is the Microsoft software - Word and Excel but even that sort of works.

> Macs have other apps besides textedit, do all of them preserve unsaved docs across restarts?

Every Mac app I’ve ever used does.

I don’t really care though, I reboot at most once ever six months

Personally it's rare that I leave something unsaved. That said it has never been an issue on macOS in 20 years.

There's plenty of tasks that can take hours that don't save their progress. E.g. running a simulation, training an AI model, rendering video. Or, these days, leaving agentic AI models running in a loop implementing tasks.

Even if the state is recoverable, it doesn't mean that it's simple to recover.

I would be infuriated if my OS decided to shut itself down without permission.

Huh?

I use a mac and a linux box. I'd never cross my mind that I cant leave some unsaved changes overnight. I leave unsaved changes for weeks across the many things I am working on.

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